Apple Forces Staff To Lie About Reception Issue, iOS 4 Deletes Music

Apple has forced their employees in Apple Care departments to sign this paper. Also they were made to read an article and sign another copy in the electronic form which lists the steps all Apple Care staff has to take when users complain about their iPhone. You might have read about these steps on this BGR leak.

The bottom half is not shown because it had the employee’s signature. “People would kill to get this screenshot”, I was told by my source which we nicknamed “Alpha”. [If you are from Press, contact me so I can send you the screenshot in original resolution.]

The quotes you see in the middle of the screenshot are from Steve Jobs himself and according to Alpha it is all a big lie. His co-workers seem to agree with him.

According to Alpha, “.. it basically says that we have to tell customer that our antenna issue is not an issue and to hold your iPhone not from the bottom left corner, and also mentions that we will not give out bumpers”. He goes on to say that, “these are direct pitches our agents have to tell people who call in to Apple Care… and all of it is complete fucking bullshit”. Oops!

What went wrong With iPhone 4? Will iOS 4.0.1 fix the problem?

Alpha explains the problem is part hardware and part software. He goes on to state that the signal needs to get boosted from within, thus from the software side they will be able to fix it with iOS 4.0.1.

Being an Apple employee, he has updated to iOS 4.0.1 (which is still in beta) along with many other employees and can confirm the signal boost. Sadly, the reception issue is still there.

However, he clarifies in the end by stating that, “but it is just the beta release for testing. It is not the final product, therefore do not make it look like I am saying it is not going to work. So far it is not working, that is all I can say”.

As for the hardware part, it is a design flaw. After all, “that is what happens when you use metal around an iPhone as an antenna, the person’s hand is going to touch that metal and conduct the electrical signals.”

What is the deal with iOS 4?

People are so frustrated with the problems that most of the calls are not even about reception issue, they are also about iOS 4 deleting the entire Music collection from the PC, I was told. He explains that some users who have upgraded to iOS 4 are reporting that their entire music library has vanished, not only did they get deleted from the iPhone, but also from iTunes and the PC/Mac HDD.

He, along with other iPhone Apple Care staff has no idea why this is happening but goes on to say that “This should never happen ever!”.

The iPhone Apple Care Support staff are themselves frustrated, at one point he took over some of the calls because, “how do you pitch a teenage girl and tell her that all your music is gone and there is no way of getting them back unless you import all those CDs back to your PC/Mac”. He asks me again, “how do you pitch that to anyone?”.

If you purchased music from iTunes, you are on the safe side. Apple has record of all purchases and they will grant you all your media back. Those who imported their music collection from CDs, Apple has no record of that, so it is just gone.

What To Do And What Not To Do?

In short, if you are having reception issue there is no need to call Apple Support, nor do you need to visit the local Apple shop. The paper in the screenshot above which every agent in Apple Care had to sign has a clear message from Steve Jobs to the customers, the issues you are having is actually not an issue.

Alpha told me to, “Let people know that if they call in about this issue there is nothing we can do. I mean we really want to do something but there is nothing we can do at this point.”

He also says that some customers came down to yelling and ripping our agents. This made the agents upset because people treat them like trash.

He continues, “At one point some agents came together during a break and all agreed that iPhone should not have shipped because at the moment it is not a complete item from Apple.”

So what can you do? Nothing except wait for the next update from Apple.

In short, if you were planning a protest against Apple staff, note that they are just employees and are not responsible for the issue. According to Alpha, “There is no one to blame but Apple. You can’t even blame AT&T because it is Apple’s error”.

Extra Note from the editor: About MS Exchange

This has nothing to do with the leak but I wanted to clarify because many people were asking how can an Apple employee use MS Exchange on his work computer? If you are not sure what I am talking about, see the screenshot below.

When I asked him about this, he boasted that almost everyone at work are using it. In fact, he uses it at home too. He further states that using Microsoft products on Macs are a norm. He asks me, “Tell me a program from Apple that is like MS?”, he then continues, “because I will tell you right now that 99.9% of PC/MAC users know how to use mail program from MS because they have been around forever”.

Finally he brings the topic of competition by saying, “It is not about competition between Windows and Mac any more to the point where we separate. Those were back in 1990s. Today a lot of programs are cross compatible to reach a wider range of people.”

In the end he states, “Just because your company is a competitor of Microsoft does not mean you are anti-Windows or anti-Microsoft.” We seem to agree with his rationality.

Update: Also check out AT&T pushing out first OTA update changing carrier to 7.1 here.

I’m an iPhone 3GS owner, my first Apple product and I’ve had it for about 9 months. I’ve been astounded at how bad some aspects of the iphone are. I struggled with MobileMe to try and keep things in sync but that all went pear-shaped and they eventually refunded my subscription. So I read the hype about IOS4 and was hopeful it would make my iPhone more usable as a business tool. Wrong!! Like thousands of others, I’ve suffered the ‘reboot during call’ problem. This appears to have been resolved by a hard reset and restore to factory defaults followed by a restore of my backup. All handled over the course of an hour by a nice guy on Apple support – but I asked him why they didn’t just publish the details of how to do this on the support site. A question he had obviously asked himself and could offer no reasonable explanation. iPhone is great for watching videos and a few other things. But as a business tool – I’ll be going back to Blackberry or a Windows mobile device when my contract renews. And certainly have no plans to buy any other Apple products – my Windows 7 PC and Vista Laptop are working just fine thanks!

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